


Child in the Photograph

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Backstory, Episode Tag, Family, Friendship, Gen, Heart-to-Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 21:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/753479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>4x16 tag - spoilers. Peter-Neal friendship. For the prompt "photograph" at run-the-con on LJ.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Child in the Photograph

James had been gone for a week when Neal was unexpectedly brought up short by the sight of the photograph magneted to the refrigerator.

It had been there long enough that it had simply become part of the apartment's decor. Now he looked at it, really looked at it: his child self, with the police hat falling down over his eyes. The delight and hero-worship of the child, looking at the man he now knew his father to be, made a wave of fury rise up in him: at James, and at that long-ago child too -- for not knowing, for being so gullible and so stupid. 

There hadn't been a time since James walked out the door that Neal hadn't been angry. The anger had become, if not comfortable, then familiar -- a core of fire, hidden but barely contained. Sometimes it flared up, filling his throat with heat. Like now.

Neal tore down the photograph, sending the magnet clattering somewhere out of sight beneath the cabinets. He crumpled it viciously and threw it into the trash basket under the sink.

There was a light tap at the door. Neal ran his hand through his hair, composed himself and went to answer it. He already had a guess who it would be.

"Peter." 

Peter held up a fat stack of files. "Ready for some homework?"

Neal sighed, and grinned, and stepped back. "There's beer in the fridge."

Technically, Peter -- out on bail -- was supposed to be under house arrest, restricted to the Brooklyn townhouse if he wasn't accompanied by an FBI agent. Most of Peter's former co-workers had been utilizing a very loose interpretation of "accompanied", however. Diana had almost certainly dropped him off, and she'd be back to pick him up.

Neal approved, sort of. He wasn't sure if he ought to. Peter had always found creative end runs around the rules he didn't believe in; it was one of the reasons why Neal had been willing to pitch the anklet idea in the first place. These days, though, Neal found himself scrutinizing Peter closely, asking himself uncomfortable questions about Peter's current relationship with law and order -- and with himself. 

Peter wasn't blaming Neal for his legal predicament. That was all right; Neal had been doing more than enough for two. There was a part of him that felt as if _he_ should be nudging Peter back towards the path of law and order, a role reversal that would no doubt have made Mozzie laugh incredulously and then start talking about FBI mind control. It made perfect sense to Neal, though. Peter was supposed to be the one on the straight and narrow; Neal was the one who broke laws.

It scared him, a little, that he might have moved the set-points of Peter's moral compass that much.

Peter handed Neal the files and headed towards the refrigerator. Neal didn't think of the missing photograph until Peter paused fractionally as he reached for the refrigerator door. Of _course_ he'd noticed. But he didn't ask, just retrieved a beer and came to join Neal on the couch.

They were deep into old cold-case files -- running down leads from Ellen's evidence box -- and Neal had let his guard down completely by the time Peter went to get himself a third beer. Which of course was when Peter came back with the photo from the trash, crumpled and creased. He laid it on the coffee table on top of the case file he'd been working on. Neal noticed in the one glance he allowed himself that there was a white crease directly through the child's face. _Good,_ he thought viciously, the burning core of white-hot anger rearing up for a moment before it subsided.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said.

"Didn't think you would." Peter carefully smoothed the photo with his thumb. It didn't quite go flat; there was still a spiderweb of white cracks. _Metaphor for my childhood,_ Neal thought: even at the time, he'd been aware that the cracks were there, except he hadn't known what he was looking at. Only in retrospect had the pattern become clear.

_Stupid. Gullible._

"Good; then you can put that back in the trash where it belongs."

"Are you sure that's where you want it?" Peter asked. His voice was gentle, and that only made the knot of anger under Neal's breastbone burn hotter.

"I can't believe you're trying to -- what? Push me to reconcile with him? After everything?"

"I'm not." Peter's voice was still gentle and calm, but with a core of steel underneath. "This is one of the few pictures of you as a child that still exists, though, isn't it? You're young enough here ... this has to be before you went into WitSec. There can't be too many of those around."

There weren't. Another of the cracks that Neal hadn't noticed at the time, only to become visible in retrospect: his mother's lack of baby pictures of him. All parents had albums full of pictures of their children. His mother didn't, and both she and Ellen had been strangely reluctant to have pictures taken of him at all. Or of themselves. He had never really thought about it, and he doubted if _they_ had, either. It was just one of those things. A habit born of years of hiding.

No, there weren't any other baby pictures of himself that he was aware of. And any from his childhood that still remained would be in his mother's possession. He wasn't going back to get them.

"Do you carry baby pictures of yourself in _your_ wallet, Peter?" Neal asked pointedly. "It's the past. It doesn't matter anymore."

"It matters." Peter touched the picture lightly, flattening a place where it was trying to curl back along the breaks Neal had inflicted. "It always matters. It's part of you."

Anger pooled in his belly, molten-hot. "When you look at me, you see him." _Because I certainly do._

Peter sighed, and suddenly he looked exhausted -- and old. There were cracks in him now, too, that hadn't been there before. "For God's sake, Neal."

Anger was a shell, smooth and hard. "I'm his son, aren't I? And as long as I have that --" He stabbed a finger at the photograph, at the open innocence and trust beaming accusingly at him, ripping the scab away from an open wound. "I can't forget it. I can't move past it. James Bennett's son is all I'll ever be."

"James Bennett's son is what you _are,_ " Peter told him, low and fierce. "But it's not _all_ you are. Think, Neal, goddammit. You can't change your future by hiding the past."

"That's easy for you to say," Neal spat back at him. "You had the perfect, apple-pie, mom and dad and two-point-five kids upbringing, didn't you? You had the house in the suburbs. You had --"

_\-- parents who cared,_ but he bit it off, closing his teeth on the words.

He'd never meant to throw that in Peter's face. He'd never realized that he resented it as much as he did.

It was easy for Peter to be who he was. He didn't have the weight of all that baggage, all that _past,_ dragging him backwards all the time.

Peter didn't react. He studied the photo as if he was looking for something in it -- for Neal, perhaps -- and then he ran his thumb slowly, thoughtfully around the mouth of his beer bottle. "Did I ever tell you my dad was an alcoholic?"

Neal eyed him, feeling a trifle whiplashed. "No."

"He wasn't a boozer in an alley, if that's what you're thinking. I don't think any of us were really aware it was what it was." Peter was speaking mostly to the bottle, not to Neal. Occasionally he darted a little glance to the side, to check if Neal was still listening; then his eyes slid away again. "I mean, it's not that the idea was unknown; it was the seventies, not the Middle Ages. But there wasn't as much awareness as there is now. He just drank. A lot. He was in good company, in the construction trade. Most of those guys drank like fish. I never realized it wasn't normal."

Pause. He studied the bottle a little more.

"But he lost jobs because he'd show up too hungover to work. He'd miss family dinners because he was out at the bar. There were a few years in there, when I was a teenager, that my parents fought all the time. I didn't know 'til later how close they were to a divorce. I didn't know my mother was taking antidepressants. But I knew things were wrong. We almost lost the house ... I don't know, I sometimes think the sports and the math were mostly a way of giving me something to get my mind off it."

Peter stopped talking again, and Neal said at last, "You never ..."

He wasn't quite sure how to finish. Everything Peter said about his childhood had always given Neal the image of a perfect suburban family life. Now he felt as if his entire concept of Peter had come off its axis and tilted on its side.

Peter didn't say anything, but he did look sideways at Neal. He'd never been good at hiding his feelings, and the very old pain was visible in his eyes.

"I always thought your childhood was ..." Neal groped for words. "Happy."

A wry smile slanted sideways. "It was."

Neal shook his head, a little.

"It was just life," Peter tried to explain. "I had some resentment, growing up. I guess I worked through it. I loved my parents, love them, and they love me and my sister. That, at least, I never had to wonder about."

"Lucky you," Neal murmured, but the heat had gone out of his resentment.

"My uncle was a lot worse off than my dad. It's a Burke family trait, you know. Drinking too much. Uncle Billy was in and out of jail for a while. DUI. Bet you never guessed I had a jailbird in the family, huh?"

"It wouldn't have crossed my mind, no."

"He got clean, mostly, but his daughter still won't talk to him. My cousin Sue. It put a damper on family get-togethers for a while -- either Uncle Billy would show up, or Sue, or they'd both come and then spend the whole time not speaking to each other. But we worked around it, I guess." He shrugged, then rubbed his thumb over the mouth of the beer bottle again, and pushed it away. "I guess I never really stopped wondering -- worrying -- if that was going to be me, eventually. I try to be careful. I set rules for myself. I'm a big guy; I soak up a lot of alcohol before it really affects me."

"I've noticed," Neal said. He'd seen Peter, more than once, shift gears in an instant from apparently drunk to very nearly sober. And he'd seen Peter drink a lot, but had never seen him really, truly drunk.

"So I'm careful. It's something I try to be aware of, I guess."

"You never said anything."

"I guess it never crossed my mind. It's just ..." He shrugged a little. "Life. It wasn't anything unusual."

Neal looked at him carefully. Peter was sincere, in that bone-deep way that only Peter could manage. "I knew there had to be a moral hiding in there somewhere," Neal said, and was rewarded with a slight smile.

"Look, Neal, I'm not saying that if we catch up to James -- _when_ we catch up to James -- there's much chance of a friendly father and son reconciliation. Hell, I think my fist has a date with his face."

"Stand in line," Neal murmured.

Peter touched the photograph again, gently. "But he's where you come from. He's one of the only people who knew you when you were this small. He knows stories about you that no one else does. You aren't him. You aren't. But there's a part of you that is."

Neal wanted to deny it. He couldn't. Instead he picked up the photograph and looked at it again, reluctantly. He tried to see it through Peter's eyes, without the veneer of disgust that he currently felt for the kid in the photo, and that kid's wide-eyed look of adoration.

"I'm just saying," Peter said, "that you only get one past, full of good and bad, and if you throw away a piece of it because you're angry, that might be something you regret down the road a ways. You can't throw out the bad parts without throwing away the good ones too. And sometimes it's worth it. Some things aren't worth keeping. Just ... don't do it in the heat of the moment."

"You're always telling me to stop and think." Neal pulled his eyes away from the picture. He couldn't do it. Couldn't see what Peter saw in it. All he saw was someone he'd once been. Someone he wasn't. Someone he wanted to forget he'd ever been.

But Peter looked at the picture and saw something else.

"And I plan to keep saying it until it sinks in." Peter grinned.

Neal, reluctantly, smiled back, and handed him the picture. "So keep this piece of it for me."

Peter looked startled, and then deeply touched, as if Neal had handed over a piece of his heart rather than a slightly crumpled, thirty-year-old photograph.

"I think it means more to you than it does to me," Neal said, in a rare burst of total honesty. "And ... if I do want it back someday, I know you'll keep it safe."

Peter very carefully tucked the photograph away inside his jacket.

Neal, seeking somewhere safer to rest his eyes, settled on Peter's mostly-untouched beer and his own nearly empty glass of wine. "How about a cup of coffee?"

"June's Italian roast?"

"As if I'd disgrace my hostess by serving anything else."

He poured the beer down the sink and came back with two steaming cups. Peter had already spread out more cold-case files. Neal groaned.

"Tomorrow night, Peter, we're doing this in the townhouse. At least it'll be a change of scenery."

Peter met Neal's eyes as he took the cup of coffee. "Thank you," he said quietly. "I'm sure there are things you'd rather be doing with your evening."

"Not really. Sara's in London, and most of the things Mozzie wants to do are outside my radius -- not that I'd be doing them anyway," he added hastily. "Besides, this is basically --"

"Neal, if you were about to say 'my fault', I'd like to remind you that I'm entirely capable of directing blame where blame is due."

"I had noticed that, yes."

"Which means that I won't hesitate to tell you when you need to start feeling guilty. This? Not one of those times." Peter stuck a file folder into Neal's hand. "Now get to work."

Good and bad, Neal thought, accepting the file from Peter and opening it. Mostly bad, with James. Still, as much as he hated to admit it, there was something comforting -- in a way -- about the idea that the past, and all the people he'd been, couldn't be discarded like an ill-fitting suit of clothes.

It meant that everything he'd done, every choice he'd made, every person he'd touched and who had touched him was still there, for good or ill. There were times when he wanted to wash it all away, to scrub the past from his skin.

But it also meant that the people who'd come into his life would never leave it, not really. Even if circumstances came between them. Even if death did. Kate was still there. Ellen was still there.

And Peter was there, for ever and ever. No matter how hard Neal might have tried, at times, to get him to let go. In a way it didn't matter: even if something came between them in the future, even if their paths diverged and they both ended up in irreconcilably different places, they would still in some small way be a part of each other.

_For good or bad. But mostly for good._

Neal glanced at his partner, who was sunk deep in the latest case file, giving Neal a brief opportunity to observe without being seen. Peter's lips moved slightly as he perused the file -- Neal would have to remember to give him a hard time about that later. ("You can't read without moving your lips, Peter? Seriously?")

And every so often, Peter reached up to touch the pocket of his jacket where he'd put the photograph. Neal didn't think it was something he was doing consciously. It was just a reflexive movement to make sure it was still there, over his heart.


End file.
